DANTE - Dai Davies

The current network is TEN-155, this is in its second year. The core is 622Mbps
in 5 locations and the access speed is 622Mbps capable. The subscribed bandwidth
is 2.5Gbps. Connections to the US are to both ESnet and Abilene, also connected
to Israel.

The next project is called Geant. Planning is significantly underway. The
consortium is the same as for TEN-155, objective is to obtain Gbit connections,
and to extend the geographic coverage in particular Eastern Europe (Balkans, and
Baltics (Bulgaria, Romania), and Slovakia) but not at Gbit speed. Also want to
rationalize the global access. Also want to provide/emphasize guaranteed
QoS.

Expect offers by end September, want direct access to fiber capacity at 6-10
core locations and extend to 20 locations within 4 years, initial speeds are
expected to be 2.5Gbps and possible 10Gbps. The direct access to fiber is a new
challenge operationally and has regulatory implications. Today use ATM for QoS,
it works. Major challenge is to move from ATM to using IP directly for QoS.
There is an increase in operating the network rather than relying on provider.

Transatlantic prices have gone from 101KE/Mbps/yr (1998), 18 (1999), 2.7
(2000), and capacity has gone from 34Mbps to 180Mbps to 450Mbps.

They plan to try and rationalize the research connections from Europe as a
whole with other world regions: N. America, Asia-Pacific, S. America, ...
Connections may be activated at any PoP of the core and this will be transparent
access to/from any other PoP.

DFN - Michael Ernst

G-WIN is the next generation of German national network infrastructure. It is
based on WDM/SDH for IP only, will lease dark fiber, will provide a
point-to-point service with flexible bandwidth provision. Will ofer 60*34M
point-to-pointy available and switchable at any time, larger quantities can be
provided within 6 weeks. Similar architecture to US GigaPoP architecture.
Services will be 0.128 up to 2.4Gbps for Internat, for point to point will offer
2 or 34Mbps. CoS/QoS is urgently needed for a lot of applications, and a
definition of servives and organizational concepts. DFN-Internet gives worldwide
connectivity. Deutsche Telecomm won the bid for the backbone, routers from
Cisco. Throughput main trhruput hour was 1.28HGbps (1999), 2,8 (2000), .. 38Gbps
(2003). Current 200TBytes/month.

The migration from B-WiN started in June 2000, To US have 2*OC12 into 25
Broadway (Telehouse), but capacity to TEN-155 is currently 2*OC3 later this year
upgrade to OC-12, access to Abilene via Hudson. They have 64kbps from DFN to
China which is heavily used. The G-WiN topology is mainly 622Mbps links.

INFN/GARR - Enzo Valente

30 INFN departments or Labs connected @ 34-155Mbps (ATM), physiaclly
connected through GARR, with continental connectivity provided by TEN-155 and
intercontinental @622Mbps provided by GARR (now). For commodity Internet there
is another link, also for non Abilene university sites.

There is ongoing usual activity for European Labs. Present activities are
preparation for LHC upgrading, also to support the BaBar computing regional
center in Rome.

GARR will upgrade to Gbit network in one year (Dec-01) with GEANT
architecture. There will be QoS or bandwidth allocation (no more ATM?)., there
is also a request for setting up VPNs in particular for museums.

Big issues are access to non Abilene universities (very poor connectivity
since competing with commodity Internet traffic), reserved or very high
bandwidth (e.g. Abilene works well since only ~ 5% utilization), and the effect
of the GRID is unknown (how much bandwidth will be used is very unclear, both in
estimates and understanding the matrix of flows.

Access to ESnet has been very painful, with lots of delays which were very
costly to INFN. The problems are particularly serious for BaBar.

UK - Hughes-Jones

Networking for HEP in UK is represented to PPNCG. PPNCG includes HEP
and astronomy, monitor end to end performance, investigate new
applications/technologies, provide advice on kit/facilities, use ICFA tools.
SuperJANET core is 155Mbps. 2*155Mbps lines to US, 3rd in use 18 July, 4th
planned soon. Connect to CANARIE, ESnet (at Hudson) Traffic from US is factor 3
greater. Losses were bad showed 40% March 1999, 20% Oct-99, now < 2%. Losses
to CERN and DESY are very small. So right now users are happy. The impact of
CAR/WRED appears to be a factor of 2 in loss. More bandwidth is a bigger
help.

Government has discussed 165M pounds to develaop computing grid
infrsatructure, not clear how it will be split across rersearch councils, not
just for HEP. Setting up management structure to coordinate PPARC activities.
Kenn interest in middleware nitiative being led by CERN which will be needed by
HEP worl;dwide They have integrated PAW with Globus.

Throughput for 8 FTP steams is reduce/stream by 0.8.

Contract for SuperJANET4 to WorldCom to be at 2.%Gbps upgrade to 10Gbps in
2001. Routers are out for tender (Cisco GSR or Juniper G40). All sites to
be up by March 2001 (Manc-ULCC by end Dec 00).

Canada - Dean Karlen

Quality of international connections has improved. They use PingER with data
from Sept 1998 in particular from TRIUMF Beacon site. Seeing < 1% loss. To US
universities things look good (but mainly on Abilene). Canada to UK now looks
good., to DFN priority traffic improved but only acceptable at the moment, CERN
is excellent. To Japan it is poor, but improved in March 2000 when got improved
peering for Carleton.

CA*net2 is a 2nd gen. ATM network for R&E operational since 1998.
Transition to CA*net3 is in progress currently POS, with OC-48 (2 lambda of 16
channel DWDM), will upgrade to OC-192 (8 lamda), funded until July 2002.

CA*net4 plans: onnect R&E dark fiber nets with typical $30K institution
costs and a 20 year lifetime. IP over DWDM and routing with wavelengths under
control of the customer, still in planning stages .. stay tuned. Interesting
direction of moving to building own networks.

ESnet Update DOE Perspective - George Seweryniak

Program scientific discovery through advanced computing plan submitted to
congress 24 March 2000, laid out an aggressive plan to build an infrastructure,
got $20M.

There is a security plan, strategic plan, program plan, progress report,
independent periodic reviews, there is an ESnet WW information site http://www.es.net,
performance monitoring http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/
(very important to show how well things are going), interagency coordination.
Funding for ESnet has increased (in particular have doubled international
spending in last 2 years).

ESnet 5 - Jim Leighton

Current net is still ATM core based. International connections at NY,
STAR-TAP and W. Coast. Passed 30TB/month.

QWEST may overlap with Sprint over 2 years, expect to complete most in year
2000. Provides high-performance testbed, research collaboration and advances
services for the production network. OC48 to SNV hub and to LBNL. Working on
direct connection to KEK in SNV.

Japan: JAERI is congested at 1.Mbps and seeing heavy packet loss. NIFS at
256kbps is also congested. KEK (10Mbps) goes via Chicago and is not congested
(40-60%).

CERN-ESnet heavy peaks for long periods. CA*ESnet is growing but not
congested.

DFN/INFN/DANTE come into Telehouse 25 Broadway. It has a 50Mbps link to ESnet
hub at 60 Hudson. JANET /SURFnet/NORDUnet/JAnet is at OC3 at Hudson also OC12 to
QWest. In August will move MIT/BNL/PPPL off Sprint to QWEST (MIT T3, BNL OC3...)

Aggregate traffic to Europe is ~ 6Mbps (much higher out to Europe).

In response to a question about the need to improve SLAC's connectivity and
the need to provide upgrades more quickly, Jim noted the problem.

CERN - Olivier Martin

They are upgrading from a 20Mbps from C&W to as 45Mbps to a KPN/QWest
circuit. CERN is connected to STAR-TAP, CIXP, TEN-155, IN2P3. The new
contract gave big price performance improvements and a budget increase of 20-25%
may make possible to move to 4*STM-1 for Us links faster than originally planned
but only makes sense if there are real prospects to make effective use of the
capacity end to end which is far from being the case today. Their main concerns
are for accessing SLAC & FNAL. there is a question of where to land in US,
NY or Chicago. NY pros has direct peering with Abilene, Canarie & ESnet,
availability of dual unprotected SDH circuits, needs STARtap international
transit network. Chicago has direct peering with FNAL.

Very high speed file transfer assumes high performance switched LAN (requires
time and money), and there is a high performance WAN (this requires money but is
possible, and requires careful engineering). Problem is to achieve high thruput
on long distance links (high bandwidth*delay paths), new protocols may be needed
(e.g. skyX), or ad-hoc solutions (e.g. TCP relays).

DESY - Michael Ernst

DFN transatlantic (TA) upgrade mid Oct '99 from 155Mbps to 4*155Mbps (ATM,
PoS), distributed connections to BWiN), DFN PoP in US moved to NY/Telehouse.
Hanover, Munich, Leipzig, Koln to US. OC3 link to TEN-155 is
oversubscribed. DESY monthly traffic has heavy growthdoubled Jan-00 to
Jun-00. Connectivity to US users are suffering from overloaded links. The
dedicated PVC has been turned off for technical reasons (incompatible with DFN
QoS pilot). Most traffic from W. to Germany (20% other direction).
Connectivity to CA*net goes via commercial provider at one point and is bad
(DANTE to ALTERnet). Working with DANTE to resolve (i.e. to rtoute DANTE direct
to CA*net. Since last Thursday upgraded from 4*155 to 2* 622Mbps which has
improved things, but not to Canada. Still need reserved bandwidth. DFN will
introduce CoS/QoS plan to start with 4 classes and HEP will get one. European
link to TEN-155 is also overloaded (but flows in and out are more symmetric).
Still a major challenge for providers to get new links in place on time.
Connectivity to Japan is a major improvement can get 2GByte per day @ >
100KBytes/sec. May try and get a managed bandwidth service to Japan.

APAN started in June 1997 http://www.apan.net
objective to promote regional collaboration and building regional hubs very
useful to ASIA HENP.

She showed lots of PingER plots of performance between KEK and FNAL, SLAC,
Wisconsin, ITEP.

Testbed between Japan and Europe for telemedicine and IPv6. Includes CERN,
KEK, MONARC, H.323 DV over IP, data grid, IPv6. Japan Gigabit Network (JGN)
http://www.jgn.tao.go.jp/ started in
1998 and is a 5 year program

Concerns include security how does one manage high security and high
performance, do we need a HEP VPN. A 2nd concern is a higher quality network to
Asia-Pacific region.

Update on ITER - Casci

There is a new design with reduced parameters. EU, Japan and Russian
federations are doing the design. EU, Japan and Canada are expected to offer
sites in Spring 2001.

The data currently exchanged between the joint work sites has stayed
constant, the normal evolution of the links between Europe & US/Japan was
enough to support the project. Garching uses WIN backbone. Average 250kbps
available is adequate. The future site requirements will be to support the NAKA
and Garching remote sites plus the ITER site. It will be a big collaboration
with remote analysis, diagnostics and general remote participation. Unlikely due
to safety issues (they use tritium) to need remote control of the machine.

To get experience of remote requirements they are using JET. A 2Mbps line
from JET to JANet is currently in use, this also has connectivity to TEN-155.
First tests are very positive and are providing valuable input for "remote
participation" for ITER.

NSF - George Strawn

PITAC (Presidential Information Technical Advisory Committee) introduced an
influential report, that resulted in a proposal to congress to provide a
fundamental increase in funding for IT research. Went $180M to $270M in 1999 to
2000, also hope for another $100M next year. The major focii are software,
scalable information infrastructure, high end computing, social impacts. This
will require the science of computing to be propelled forward. There was a
solicitation last fall, being dealt with now. Received 2000 proposals requesting
$300M. Whittle down to $190M, up to announce exciting projects under ITR banner
by this fall. Hope for more money next year. The most relevant to networking is
the scalable information infrastructure. We are moving towards a billion node
Internet, but can only simulate a million nodes.

Advanced networking infrastructure initiatives at NSF. For last 4-5 years,
have been supporting STAR-tap and international connections with 15% of budget
extends to 2002.. Bulk of money is in supporting domestic backbone and
encouraging universities to connect to it. In last few years was $10M per year
for vBNS backbone and $20M for connections. Now vBNS is not supported by NSF,
MCI will continue support at no cost. Made 170 awards to universities to connect
to vBNS or Abilene. Also a program to support middleware, measurement under
Internet technology program.

PITAC had 6 workshops to make future recommendations. The recommendations are
to move up the protocol stack, i.e. middleware and applications. ITR interested
in scientific and engineering applications which will make use of networks only
just available. Need to be of merit to the proposing disciplines/sciences so
want joint funding. They will give direct support to the science as well
as the networking. Will also be open to international, national and regional and
local infrastructure requirements of the proposals.

Middleware is an important activity and see much global activity working on
it. But industrial colleagues are suggesting that middleware will be handled by
industry.

NSF networking infrastructure support is moving more towards scientific
community interest support and away from broad academic community support (more
like DoE and NASA). PITAC also recommended that NSF get more involved at looking
at how to serve the scientific community in the long term (20-30 years).

George Strawn is very interested in the moves into dark fiber. Wants to help
dark fiber industry to develop in order to reduce the costs by large
amounts.

Issues - Larry Price

Rapid development of European backbone: new modes of connections between
US & Europe (Jim Leighton & Dai Davies)

Access to US universities not on I2 or ESnet. Routing to I2 can be
asymmetric and produce performance problems (Winkler: routing WG meeting in
a month))

Role of non-TCP services in file transfer and other applications (Harvey
Newman).

QoS: how to implement (Richard Hughes-Jones)

FTP performance enhancement: working group? (David Williams)

Authentication tool and environment worldwide (David Williams)

Speed vs. security (Dennis, Olivier Martin)

Relationship to NASA - there are joint experiments, connection is
important

Monitoring impact, technology and follow up (Les Cottrell)

STAR TAP - Linda Winkler

Provided a persistent point for international connectivity for the US. Not
meant to be the only point of connnection. there are about 14 international
connections. CERNET (China) will be up later this year, will initially be 2Mbps
going to 10Mbps.

Initially was a layer 2 connect point, sites brought in their ATMs and
bi-laterally peered with whom they needed two. This requires considerable
skills, so asked to put in IPv4 routing (i.e. a STAR TAP provided router), also
provide IPv6 routing. There has been Diffserv experiments with DoE EMERGE and
some international links. They have many measurement machines and support
OC3MON, NLANR AMP. Also support an NLANR web cache.

They are developing international peering with sites in Seattle, LA, NY &
Miami as well as Chicago. The distributed ST allowed transit from JANet and
DANTE via NY to Chicago to Yokohama for INET. Hope to provide such transit on a
persistent basis.

Testbed is to provide a persistent WAN test bed. Allow testing & research
without jeopardizing the production network operation, serving as a staging area
before putting into production.

Bandwidth management vision is to allow power users to reserve large portions
of available bandwidth for fixed periods of time. ESnet is developing a
simplified reservation agent and bandwidth. Initial assumption is taht
"gonzo" reservations are sparse (i.e. few authorized users, few runs,
few hours/run). Many complicated issues including authentication, authorization,
accounting, it is difficult to allocate a distributed service, it is difficult
to reserve a distributed service (may predefine paths to match reservations),
reserving MPLS paths may be an initial answer. The network will provide poor(er)
service to other users at run time (is this acceptable).

They are looking at doing a CA & CS, with the vision that ESnet wouldf
participate in the establishment of teh infrastructure needed to build a
production-quality DSG-PKI.

ESnet is looking at a bandwidth reservation agent. They want to provide a
petite (low bandwidth) QoS where they assign a fixed relatively small level of
QoS traffic to each major site (e.g. for VC & VoIP). They will probably use
MPLS where the source can now select what path to use.

Miami may become a connection point to some S. American networks. AMpath is
working with Florida International U to provide a S. America crossing including
Brazil (Rio & Sao Paulo/Santos), Argentina, Columbia, Chile. The Global
Crossing cables come up Atlantic side 4Q this year, Pacific 2Q 01, will then
need connections from local networks to the "Telehouse", the country
will have 43Mbps to Miami. The Global Crossing commitment is for 3 years. Other
cable providers are building out to S. America..

NII

This is the follow on to NACSIS. They provide networking for research and
education in Japan. Also provide international connectivity to ESnet and
elsewhere. Bandwidth to US is 30Mbps maximum and 10Mbps in general. Have 50Mbps
to London/DANTE. Telehouse London is full, so moving to London dockland area.
Bandwidth to San Jose is 40Mbps shared with Abilene. Abilene connect on W. Coast
goes from San Jose to LA. ESnet still connects at Chicago. Awaiting direct
connection to ESnet in San Jose.

Data Grids in Physics and Astronomy- Harvey Newman

BaBar 100TB in 2000, ~10PB by 2005, ~100PB by 2010. LHC is about
100Mbytes/sec from 3rd level trigger.

The success of BaBar in using the network to avoid tape copying was very
exciting to many participants, both in its immediate impact on the network and potential (e.g. with
FNAL RUN II and LHC) future network impacts. The word was that apart from bulk
raw data tapes are dead. I had a discussion with Harvey concerning the impact of
SLAC (to IN2P3) on the CERN international link, and he put together some
planning figures for future upgrade requests for CRTN US link.

I met with Richard Hughes-Jones of Manchester to discuss the components
involved in RTT delays including PCI bus etc. I have a paper on his findings. We
also discussed our mutual desires to collaborate on a UK funded QoS proposal
between SLAC and Daresbury. This proposal is being put forward by Robin Tasker
and Paul Kummer of DL.

A issue of increasing interest is the need for improved performance to
countries with ESnet interest outside N. America, W. Europe, Japan.

Issues: other regions

Improved connectivity needed to:

China – via KEK

Russia – via KEK (fiber), DESY (satellite)

And who else:

How do we decide who else?

Collaborator lists of major experiments, Particle Data Group booklet

Who has poor connectivity? We have measurements.
Which countries are asking for help?
What can/should we do about improving performance?

CCIRN – coordinate with, co-observe, get report from CCIRN at
next meeting

The table below shows the HEP countries (outside N. America, W. Europe,
Japan, Singapore) listed in the Particle Physics Data Group (PDG) diary sorted
by the number of institutions per country and the number of collaboration sites
per country from major HENP and Fusion experiments.